Lindt White Chocolate with Roasted Almonds and Almond Brittle

Some days, I’m all about the thrill of the new. Sure, most of the chocolates in my post-travel stash are technically new, seeing as I haven’t opened them, but they’ve been in my company for so long that they feel familiar. Imagine you work at a coffee shop patronised by regular customers. Then imagine it’s a spring-time Saturday, and you’re bopping away to a free concert at the Botanical Gardens. Suddenly, you spot one of the regular [coffee] customers, and you start smiling as if you’re great friends. But, of course, you quickly remember that you don’t know each other at all. Imagine that sense of the banal-known-yet-actually-unknown. I feel that way about some of my long-stashed chocolates.

So it was with an unjustified (in terms of my usual dark-leaning tastes) amount of glee that I discovered, via the stupendous Kath, that Lindt has recently released four new chocolates to the Australian market.

Of these four, one piqued my interest. (Plain milk, milk with whole hazelnuts, and milk fruit and nut – I abjure you*.)

Lindt Swiss Gold White Chocolate with Almonds

Chocolate I can do. Snow-covered mountains and skiing? Not so much.

I realise that I’ve only blogged one other white chocolate here so far: the wondrous Vestri’s White Chocolate with Pistachios. I’m not anti-white chocolate on principle, but there simply aren’t enough quality (or bizarrely-flavoured) white chocolates out there for me to do tasty, tasty battle with. (That said, El Rey’s Icoa, Askinosie’s whites, and Vosges’ d’Olivia are well worth going a round or two with.)

If Lindt’s white chocolate had merely incorporated whole almonds, I would have said thanks but no thanks. Plain nuts with plain chocolate bores me. Luckily for Lindt, for me, and for you, this chocolate is peppered not only with whole roasted almonds, but with almond brittle. Behold:

Those ain't no poison ivy marks, them's spots of sweet brittle goodness! (Nope, I have no idea what dialect I'm going for there. Do you?)

Lindt’s Swiss Gold White Chocolate with Almonds has a clean and crisp aroma of fresh cream, tempered with subtle hints of roasted nuts (funny, that). I was pleased to see that the brittle was evenly dispersed throughout the chocolate, as were the browned and thereby well-roasted whole almonds (see photo below).

The taste of this chocolate isn’t particularly complex, but there’s something endearing about its simplicity. The flavours consistently call to mind fresh cream and milk, yet not in the sense of any overwhelming fattiness or thickness in the mouth. Instead, this chocolate tastes like fresh, cold, crisp, and naturally sweet milk, and like cream lightly whipped with a dusting of icing sugar (this is me disregarding, for the moment, that I don’t like token cream splotches on my desserts.)

Surprise! That's where the whole almonds were hiding. On the bottom.

The almond brittle provides crunchy textural contrast and bursts of toffee sweetness, while the whole roasted almonds are almost enough to make me rethink my plain-nuts-in-chocolate aversion. Spectacularly crisp and full-flavoured, the tending-towards-savoury roasted almonds work as a great foil to the sweet chocolate. In fact, the almonds somewhat overwhelm the white chocolate’s subtlety, but no matter. I quite enjoyed the respite from unwavering milky sweetness.

White chocolate, in any form, will never replace my super-dark chocolate love (did I mention I have a Lindt 99% in my stash?), but this version certainly placated my desire for novelty.

Also, my wonderful father bought this for me. Dad? Thank you muchly.

* Darn tootin’ that’s a Sookie Stackhouse reference. But just so you know, I’m also halfway through Bleak House. Take that, high/low culture divide.

For some reason, this has made me think of the container of “smokehouse almonds” we got by accident at work once, many years ago. You could only eat about three of them at a time, due to the extreme saltiness and overwhelming fake smoke flavor. Sometimes they were just what you needed after a morning of eating nothing but cookie dough. (What? No, that never happened.) But now I’m thinking that they, or perhaps better, real smoked salted almonds, would be an excellent foil to white chocolate. Hmmm….

I’m not usually a big fan of white chocolate either but this does sound rather inviting. I’m surprised the brittle didn’t make the white chocolate overly sweet – I think that’s why I always love the contrast of bitter nuts or tart berries with mine.

TheHungryScholar: He is pretty great! Are you a Sookie fan too? There are actually some really nice white chocolates out there, once you get beyond the sugary mass market trash and focus on the good chocolatiers. You should search out El Rey’s Icoa – it doesn’t taste anything like standard white choc 🙂

Camille: Vosges’ Barcelona bar pairs hickory smoked almonds with milk chocolate, and I think it works really well – quite savoury, but in a really good way. So I think your noggin is onto a good thing!

Mmoyal85: That’s what France is for! 😀

Lisasfoods: This is actually the first (solid) white chocolate bar Lindt has retailed in Australia – we don’t get the coconut white one that’s available in America. Have you tried that?

Lisa: It’s only *just* become available – my dad found it in Coles Woden, but I haven’t yet found it in my local Coles/Woolies, so I guess its still percolating through the market. I hope you find it soon!

Kath: I just call it like I see it! 😀

Baking Serendipity: Teehee, thank you! It was hard to get the analogy out of my head and onto paper/the screen without it sounding all confuddled 😛

Helen: Another Sookie/True Blood fan? Hurrah! Actually, the brittle pieces were small enough not to overpower the bar with cloying sweetness. The roasted almonds were really flavourful, too, so they tempered the white chocolate nicely. I still prefer wackier/darker chocolates, but this wasn’t bad!

Dear Be Fri, I’m feeling a bit guilty about bargaining off my children when I’m still rather single. It’s a teensy bit of a dilemma. In other news, I actually do tend to save a few squares of most chocolates I review in case I want to compare them with something later, so if you happen to drive to Canberra tomorrow, you could score not only this but even some edamame + curry + granola chocolate… Love, St Ends.

Simply Life: For once, this is an Aussie not an American chocolate, so you’re out of luck! 😛

Argh! I forgot to drive to Canberra today to pick up chocolate! And don’t feel guilty about bargaining off your unborn children, you may as well make the most of them while you can. But if it’ll make you feel better, I can bargain them off for you! 😀

Agnes: And I spent the entire day standing on the sidewalk with a placard reading “Off the Spork”, too! Bad Be Fri! Hmm… if I let you bargain them off, does that mean you’ll ask for a commission? Who are you, Rumpelstiltskin? 😀

I don’t get excited about white chocolate but brittle is another matter – will look out for this one

actually I get a bit blase about a stash such as your chocolate one (oh wish I had a chocolate stash anywhere near as exciting as yours) but I think I would have a moment where I was just fed up with it and would demolish it in a ridiculously short time frame – admire your self control

Oooh, I bought one of these today! Now catching up on posts I see your review. Gotta love synchronicity like that. I haven’t tried it yet though. Had some Lindt 50% instead. My 9 year old has gone all Masterchef. He made us a raspberry fool on Sunday night (so good, I’d never had a fool before, but now I realise that I’d been a fool to leave it so long to have a fool, was just going to recommend it, but then I thought that you don’t do dairy, hmmm, such a shame, it was glorious). Anyway he made a second fool tonight as we still had raspberries and cream in the freezer/fridge, but he wanted to make it a chocolate raspberry one. So I bought a Lindt 50% for him to mix through, he doesn’t really like dark chcoolate. It worked ok, but I much preferred the bursting flavour of the plain raspberry one, even though it’s winter and it was made with frozen raspberries. And I wish you hadn’t mentioned that Vestri white chocolate and pistachio. I think of all your reviews that’s really the one that’s stuck in my memory. I need to try that stuff.

Louise: Clearly, you need to go to Florence next for the Vestri! That’s fantastic that your son is getting into cooking. I’m sure the fool was delicious but I have a tried and true raspberry whipped dessert that shall never be toppled in my heart 😉 I should blog it some time… (P.S. I haven’t tried the 50%… not dark enough for me, just seems like a marketing ploy, but maybe I shouldn’t be so snobbish!)